Erotic, scientific, literary… Terry Tempest Williams’s intimacy with the natural landscapes of her native Redrock Wilderness in the canyon country of southern Utah forms an excavation into the meaning of place: how it shapes us, how it transforms us, how it unites us.

In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by.